The lists! The lists! I’d been in Uganda a month before I finally stopped dreaming about the mammoth preparations for my two-year relocation from London to East Africa: the packing lists, the shopping lists, the list of goodbyes – the list of injections.

But I was finally there and embarking on what had been my teenage dream – to live in Africa.

My new compound could have been suburban Surrey, except for the huge palm tree. I felt a little guilty. My own en-suite bathroom and a flushing toilet? Where was the pit latrine? I was almost disappointed to be living in such a posh-looking house. This wasn’t roughing it. How was this going to be the challenging, life-changing experience I wanted without such physical hardships?

Oh, how naive I was.

I left behind a very comfortable life in London to become a professional VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) volunteer with the Uganda Conservation Foundation, a British charity, where I fund-raised to protect elephants. My dream job, on paper at least.

A new life in a new country is exciting – but it’s not always easy. Life’s little luxuries are important, and if that means having a flushing toilet, then suffer it. But my biggest fear about Africa was not the toilets. It was not missing my family either, or surviving on a volunteer allowance – it was the prospect of living with cockroaches. I have a phobia about them, and when I see one, I feel sick to my gut.

Once I arrived in Uganda I soon learnt not to kill them; killing a cockroach means you have to get within arm’s length of it. When you see a cockroach, delegate, or – if you’re feeling brave – get a broom and sweep it out of an open door. Luckily I found someone to help me – Simpson, who lived on my compound and provided security for me and my office for my first three years in Uganda. He was my absolute saviour when it came to dealing with roaches and I came to regard him as my Ugandan brother.

Another thing that helped me was knowing that, as a VSO, I had a ready-made social network to slot into. Overseas, you bond with people very quickly I found – drink helps. You dispense with normal formalities and if you click with someone, by the weekend you're swapping life stories. I felt immediately that I would stay in Uganda longer than two years.

People have come in and out of my life constantly and it did not take long for me to start selecting friends according to how long they planned to be in the country. It's nothing personal, it's just a question of survival. Expat life can be an emotional rollercoaster.

On the plus side, whenever a friend leaves, I gain a household appliance. I think of Stacey when I pick a book off the shelf; Jan when I open my fridge; Robert, when I use his old gas cooker; Mark and Jennie as I sit at my desk.

Joining Kampala Hash House Harriers is one of the best things I’ve done. Ostensibly, an amateur running club, this organisation, which calls itself "a drinking club with a running problem" has its roots in post-war Malaysia when a group of expats decided that the best way to get over the excesses of the weekend was to go running. The Kampala Hash is 95 per cent locals, and we’ve run, walked and partied all over Uganda and East Africa. In our trademark Hash T-shirts, you really can’t tell the volunteer from the city mayor or the prince (two of our more well-known regular runners).

Hashing aside, I’ve singularly failed to manage my fitness. Bye bye London, bye personal trainer. My lifestyle changed completely: no more stairs to run down to the Underground, no more housework. I didn’t even have to make my own bed. In Namuwongo, I worked from home in a bungalow and had the use of a car. House staff would go to the market for me. I drank more. It helped break the ice when I met new people. God I got sick of “so how long are you in Kampala…?”

I struggled with Kampala’s famous seven hills – and the city is 1,000 metres above sea level, which takes time to adjust to. Walking is not easy for other reasons too – there are few pavements and it’s too hot to walk far during the day. Being on the Equator, it’s dark in Uganda at 6.30pm throughout the year.

The solution? A dog. Getting my first dog, Baldrick, was one of the best things I've ever done. Having him meant I could walk where I wanted, when I wanted. What gets stared at more than a Muzungu (a 'dizzy foreigner' usually a white person)? A Muzungu with a dog. Ugandans fear dogs, especially one that unexpectedly appears from the shadows with a Muzungu in tow. You get used to being stared at.

I also became friends with the mouse that lived in my fridge. I missed my skimmed milk and breakfast cereal. Hard to find and four times the UK price, these were not an option for a volunteer. Even if I could afford something, I couldn’t store it properly. The door kept falling off the ancient, rusty fridge – straight onto my bare toes at dawn one morning as we left for a field trip safari. We could never shut the fridge door properly after that, as I discovered one day when a mouse jumped out of it.

I was so worried about insects infesting my food, I bought some cheap Chinese storage containers: they didn't keep the insects out though. I bought a tin of curry powder thinking that would keep them out – but opened it to find it full of weevils.

After painstakingly removing 20 weevils from my porridge for the umpteenth time, I gave up caring. I figured I must have eaten plenty of insects by then. They obviously weren't going to kill me.